User Experience (UX) encompasses all the aspects of the user's interaction with a company and its product. So, the product has to work, it should be easy to use, and enjoyable at the same time. In the real-world, User Experience (UX) is often misunderstood to be similar to the User Interface (UI). UI includes what the user visualize, for example, text, videos, images, colors, and many more. UX is a user's interaction with those UI elements.
So, what makes great UX? The answer is simple:
- It should offer some value, i.e usefulness, or allow a user to do things.
- It should offer usability, i.e easy to use.
- It should offer adaptability, i.e easy to get started.
- It should offer desirability, i.e fun and engaging graphic/visual design (image, color, fonts, and shapes) and effective content.
Do you think UX matters? Yes, it does.
Many top companies in the world hire UX designers to create seamless interaction of their products with customers. Furthermore, UX decreases development inefficiencies making the development task well-ordered for the front-end engineers. After all, the development of quality products will help a company perform better financially.
How does a user remember a product?
Here is a quick overview of how a user remembers a product. A product can be a random application, however, the points discussed below implies to all:
Identifying analogous and Discrimination: Products that are similar to the ones a user has used before and different from ones a user has used in the past.
Consistency: Consistency across the entire product ensures quick referencing. Easy navigation, interactive designs, flexibility, and the efficiency of use (Keyboard shortcuts) reinforce the idea of quick referencing. Furthermore, consistency is indispensable between style and UI elements.
A user never remembers the mismatched UI elements, some elements in UI that create confusion, or weak association and navigation throughout.
Processes in the UX
- Company Research: Initially, before designing UX for a company, the UX designer must be acknowledged with the company's brand, culture, industry-related news, and competitors.
- User Research: After company research, the UX designer should focus on gathering user-related information. This step is critical for project success. There are several methods such as; creating a focus group, conducting surveys, card sorting methods, prototyping, interviewing, and so on. Conducting user research will help remove assumptions from the design process. Furthermore, users, in turn, appreciate and be able to use the system benefitting the goodwill of an organization.
- Information Architecture: After gathering useful information, all the content should be inventoried. Then, content auditing is performed where we analyze What is good or working well? and What is missing? Based on the findings, a new architecture is drafted and tested with users. Finally, the above steps are iterated. Information Architecture helps with findability and understandability from a user and system point of view.
- Wireframing and Visual Design: Now is the time to get things down on digital paper. There are two types of wireframing; low-fidelity wireframe and high-fidelity wireframe. A low-fidelity wireframe is quick, easy, and cheap as it allows you to get ideas out of your head, just like doodling. A high-fidelity wireframe is more detailed, realistic, and is almost near to an actual visual design. Several tools such as; Axure, Sketch, Figma, and so on are used for wireframing. On the other hand, Visual Design is the aesthetics of a site. It includes elements such as; lines, shapes, color, texture, and typography. To achieve an effective visual design, alignment, contrast, proximity between elements, layout, whitespace, and consistency should be kept into consideration.
- Usability Testing: Finally, usability testing is a task-based approach in an actual system. Satisfaction is measured based on whether a user can complete the task successfully. Rating Scale (1-10) or baseline is marked, and changes are identified to improve those numbers. While conducting usability testing, test plans are created, the environment is set up, users are identified, tests are conducted, and results are summarized. However, in some exceptional cases, heuristic testing is performed, which is an educated guess.
Heuristic Evaluation and 10 Heuristics for the UX
Neilsen's Heuristics
The following lists the ten heuristics refined by Nielsen and defined by himself with Rolf Molich in 1990. They are:
- Visibility of the system status: The status of the system must be visible to all the users. For example, Copying 10 items to Drive G: in the progress bar or Windows is shutting down.
- Match between system and the real world: The system should speak the user's language and follow real-world conventions. The information should be kept natural and logical. For example, Error 123 can be rewritten as Error while fetching the data.
- User Control and Freedom: Your system should support undo, redo, and most importantly emergency exit without allowing a user to go through an extended dialogue.
- Consistency and Standard: Consistency in the word, icon, functions while you transit from one page to another within a website.
- Error Prevention: Prevention of an error before it occurs is the key. Otherwise, discard an error-prone situation or present users with a confirmation action, whether they want to proceed or not.
- Recognition rather than recall: The user should not have to recall the information from one dialogue to another. Also, make the instructions easily retrievable and visible wherever appropriate.
- Flexibility and efficiency of use: It focuses on giving users ways to speed up their work. For example, MAC OS gives privilege to its users to create a custom keyboard and shortcut commands. Another way to increase the efficiency of a user can be to give easy access to its functionalities. For instance, to make an online payment the recent transaction can be made available.
- Aesthetic and minimalist design: Dialogue should not contain irrelevant information. Development Community is a great example of this heuristic. It is essentially like a blank page with Write a new post, Edit, and Preview options on the top when you start writing.
- Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors: An error message should be expressed in plain language with a necessary solution. If you have entered an incorrect username, then a dialogue with Please enter your correct username should pop up, or the font color for the username should turn red with the message Incorrect username. Also, the username recovery options should be prominent.
- Help and documentation: Finally, required or supportive documents and FAQ (Frequently Asked Question) section should be updated.
Usability Testing
Usability Testing is a process of testing a product designed with representative users. The goal here is to identify usability-related problems, collect data, and rate the satisfaction of a user after using the product. Generally, while running a usability test, a test plan is drafted, representative users are chosen, and the findings are analyzed. Usability testing does not require a formal lab and can be conducted remotely.
Advantages of usability testing
One of the main advantages of conducting usability testing is the identification of problems by the design team prior to coding. The early identification of problems, the less expensive the fixes will be. During usability testing, we will know whether participants are able to complete the task, the time taken to complete the task, level of satisfaction, changes required to improve user performance and analyze whether user objectives are met.
Furthermore, the cost of usability testing depends on the number of days required to complete the testing, the number of participants, and the types of tests that will be performed.
Aspects to be considered while performing usability testing are:
- Time is the major aspect while performing usability testing. Generally, a usability specialist plans time for running the test, analyzing the findings, drafting a report, and presenting the findings to the development teams.
- The cost of recruiting is decided based on the requirement. Either participant is hired from the same company within their office hours or by recruiting agencies.
- Rental Cost is planned when you secure a room for testing such as; Meeting room or Conference room. Furthermore, if you do not have any equipment to record the evaluation or monitor such as; camera, sound recorder, and projector then it will be added under rental cost.
- Compensation for participants is planned for travel or time factor only.
Finally, usability testing is an iterative process. Usability specialists should have a clear idea of why testing is conducted in the first place and implement the changes.